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Greening the United Nations Charter Greening the United Nations Charter World Politics in the Anthropocene Frank Biermann February 2012 2 | EARTH System governance working paper No. 21 Citation This paper can be cited as: Biermann, Frank. 2012. Greening the United Nations Charter. World Politics in the Anthropocene. Earth System Governance Working Paper No. 21. Lund and Amsterdam: Earth System Governance Project. All rights remain with the author. Author's Contact: Frank Biermann, Amsterdam Global Change Institute, VU University Amsterdam. De Boelelaan 1087, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [email protected] Working Paper Series Editor Ayşem Mert Amsterdam Global Change Institute VU University Amsterdam ([email protected]) Abstract A constitutional turn is needed to bring the UN system in line with the urgent needs of planetary stewardship and earth system governance in the 21st century. Yet how this could be organized in practice remains a challenge and subject to political and scholarly debate. This paper contributes to this debate by outlining four reforms of the UN system that would advance global decision-making by addressing major shortcomings in the current system: Lack of integration of economic and environmental policies in the UN system; institutional fragmentation and weakness of the environmental pillar of sustainable development; lack of high-level regulatory competence and oversight regarding areas beyond national jurisdiction; and insufficient integration of scientific insights into political decision-making. The reforms proposed would together create an Earth Alliance in the UN system, consisting of a high-level UN Sustainable Development Council, a World Environment Organization, a UN Trusteeship Council for Areas beyond National Jurisdiction, and an UN Global Environmental Assessment Commission. EARTH System governance working paper No. 21 | 3 Series Foreword This working paper was written as part of the Earth System Governance Project, a ten- year research initiative launched in October 2008 by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change under the overall auspices of the Earth System Science Partnership. Earth system governance is defined in this Project as the system of formal and informal rules, rule-making mechanisms and actor-networks at all levels of human society (from local to global) that are set up to prevent, mitigate and adapt to environmental change and earth system transformation. The science plan of the Project focusses on five analytical problems: the problems of the overall architecture of earth system governance, of agency of and beyond the state, of the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and processes, of their accountability and legitimacy, and of modes of allocation and access in earth system governance. In addition, the Project emphasizes four crosscutting research themes that are crucial for the study of each analytical problem: the role of power, of knowledge, of norms, and of scale. Finally, the Earth System Governance Project advances the integrated analysis of case study domains in which researchers combine analysis of the analytical problems and crosscutting themes. The main case study domains are at present the global water system, global food systems, the global climate system, and the global economic system. The Earth System Governance Project is designed as the nodal point within the global change research programmes to guide, organize and evaluate research on these questions. The Project is implemented through a Global Alliance of Earth System Governance Research Centres, a network of lead faculty members and research fellows, a global conference series, and various research projects undertaken at multiple levels (see www.earthsystemgovernance.org). Earth System Governance Working Papers are peer-reviewed online publications that broadly address questions raised by the Project’s Science and Implementation Plan. The series is open to all colleagues who seek to contribute to this research agenda, and submissions are welcome at any time at [email protected]. While most members of our network publish their research in the English language, we accept also submissions in other major languages. The Earth System Governance Project does not assume the copyright for working papers, and we expect that most working papers will eventually find their way into scientific journals or become chapters in edited volumes compiled by the Project and its members. Comments on this working paper, as well as on the other activities of the Earth System Governance Project, are highly welcome. We believe that understanding earth system governance is only feasible through joint effort of colleagues from various backgrounds and from all regions of the world. We look forward to your response. Frank Biermann Ruben Zondervan Chair, Earth System Governance Project Executive Director, Earth System Governance Project 4 | EARTH System governance working paper No. 21 1. Introduction Numerous science assessments indicate that the environmental crisis has reached a new stage, progressing from local ecological degradation to planetary transformation. The four global change research programs warned in 2001 that the entire earth system “has moved well outside the range of the natural variability exhibited over the last half million years at least. The nature of changes now occurring simultaneously in the Earth System, their magnitudes and rates of change are unprecedented.”1 The evidence of human influence on planetary systems today is such that stratigraphy experts discuss whether to classify the present time as a new epoch in planetary history, the “Anthropocene.”2 A group of experts led by Johan Rockström defined in 2009 several boundary conditions in the earth system that could, if crossed, result in a major disruption in (parts of) the planetary system. According to this study, three threshold values have been crossed in recent decades: atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations; species extinction rates; and nitrogen removal.3 For these reasons, international research programs argue that the business-as-usual way of dealing with the earth system must now be replaced “by deliberate strategies of good management that sustain the Earth’s environment while meeting social and economic development objectives.”4 As Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and Veerabhadran Ramanathan conclude, “To develop a worldwide accepted strategy leading to sustainability of ecosystems against human-induced stresses will be one of the great tasks of human societies.”5 There is no dearth of political responses to this challenge. More than 900 treaties on environmental protection are in force, and “sustainable development” has become a 1 Challenges of a Changing Earth. Declaration of the Global Change Open Science Conference Amsterdam, signed by the chairs of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change, the World Climate Research Programme, and the international biodiversity program DIVERSITAS. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 13 July 2001. Available at http://www.essp.org/index.php?id=41&L= (last accessed 10 February 2012). For the seminal summary of the underlying science, see W. Steffen, A. Sanderson, P. D. Tyson, J. Jäger, P. A. Matson, B. Moore III, F. Oldfield, K. Richardson, H.-J. Schellnhuber, B. L. Turner, II, and R. J. Wasson, Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet under Pressure (New York: Springer, 2004). 2 See J. Zalasiewicz, M. Williams, A. Smith, T. L. Barry, A. L. Coe, P. R. Brown, P. Brenchley, D. Cantrill, A. Gale, P. Gibbard, F. J. Gregory, M. W. Hounslaw, A. C. Kerr, P. Pearson, R. Knox, J. Powell, C. Waters, J. Marchall, M. Oates, P. Rawson, and P. Stone, “Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?” GSA Today 18, no. 2 (2008): 4-8. 3 See J. Rockström, W. Steffen, K. Noone, Å. Persson, F. Stuart Chapin, E. F. Lambin, T. M. Lenton, M. Scheffer, C. Folke, H.-J. Schellnhuber, B. Nykvist, C. A. de Wit, T. Hughes, S. van der Leeuw, H. Rodhe, S. Sörlin, P. K. Snyder, R. Costanza, U. Svedin, M. Falkenmark, L. Karlberg, R. W. Corell, V. J. Fabry, J. Hansen, B. Walker, D. Liverman, K. Richardson, P. Crutzen, and J. A. Foley, “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (24 September 2009): 472- 475. 4 Challenges of a Changing Earth, see above. 5 P. Crutzen and V. Ramanathan, “Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate in the Anthropocene: Where Are We Heading?” In H.-J. Schellnhuber, P. J. Crutzen, W. C. Clark, M. Claussen, and H. Held, editors, Earth System Analysis for Sustainability (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, in cooperation with Dahlem University Press, 2004), 266-292. EARTH System governance working paper No. 21 | 5 catchword that features on 32 million websites. In June 2012, the United Nations will organize in Rio de Janeiro a major summit to further advance international policy- making: the UN Conference on Sustainable Development. The conference will mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (hence known as “Rio+20”) and the fortieth anniversary of the landmark 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. One of the two main themes of the conference will be a strengthening of the institutional framework for sustainable development. So far, discursive developments in the political sphere remain fixated on short-term incremental change, without a vision for broader reform. In the science community, however, a different discourse
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